Chapter Seventeen Darius
Chapter Seventeen
Darius
Nineteen minutes later I’m sitting in the familiar coffee shop, watching the largest male on planet Earth step through the glass front door. He has to duck in order for his horns to enter, just as I did one minute earlier.
Amid the crowd of mostly East African patrons—none of whom seem to be interested in taking either of our pictures—it takes him exactly no time at all to find me seated alone at a table that, relative to our sizes, looks like it was made for children.
I sit in the wooden chair, my body overflowing its edges.
I gesture to the Wyvern to take the only other seat at the table available to him, an obnoxious hanging macramé chair shaped like an egg that swings from the ceiling.
The Wyvern approaches me with one black eyebrow cocked, his eyes a pleasantly light pink as if he’s the happiest motherfucker on this blue rock.
He points a black-and-red claw at the hanging egg seat, while I wonder what kind of deranged sociopath of a woman lets this repugnant offspring of Hellboy and a shark marry her and whether I can get my woman to do the same.
“I’m not gonna fit that.”
“I got you this.” I kick a small wooden block nested beneath the intricately tiled tabletop toward him. It’s about one foot square. He frowns at it and opens his dark-pink mouth, but a female voice beats him to it.
“I have another chair, sir, if you need something a bit larger?” A woman speaking in slightly accented English steps up behind the Wyvern, lifting a sturdy-looking wooden chair.
The Wyvern looks surprised. I imagine it’s because she called him sir. Every idiot on this dumb planet knows his name. More than mine, even. I mean, he’s recognizable as ever, looking like a gigantic, vengeful pink Easter bunny.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he replies after his shock wears off.
She grins wide enough to reveal her white teeth.
The front two have a little gap between them.
She sets the chair down, removing the little stool, then takes our orders without using a pen and paper.
I try to make mine extra complicated just to bother her, but she’s seemingly unfazed.
Her long braided hair sways near her low back as she turns with that stupid smile still on her face.
The Wyvern glances over his shoulder as he scoots closer to the table. “Why’d you want to meet here?”
“They don’t stare here.”
The Wyvern’s eyebrows scrunch. He sweeps his gaze over the coffee shop’s dozen-plus patrons and, seeing that they’re all engaged in conversations of their own—or heatedly playing backgammon—he makes an impressed face. “Okay. But why not at the COE?”
“Those nosy morons don’t need to take pictures of every fucking thing I do, and I’m not here on official COE business. I’m here to talk to you.”
The Wyvern’s expressions are too fucking expressive. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand him. He’s smiling slightly, his fangs pressing against his bottom lip. He looks like an idiot. If he weren’t pink and enormous, I’d think he were human for all the goddamn stupid looks he’s giving me.
“So, I take it you want to talk to me about your reversion?”
“Obviously.”
“A woman changed you too?”
I feel my cheeks burn. “It would seem.”
“Cynthia, right?”
“Yes, right,” I say, distracted when the barista or owner or whatever deposits our drinks on the table in front of us. I wonder about something as I watch the tall, willowy woman move away from us, tripping twice on chair legs.
“It was a good thing you poached Monika, then, I guess, since she introduced the two of you at the event last night. Was that the first time you met?”
“Yes, yes, yes. Monika . . . What?”
The big oaf shrugs, looking amazingly stupid sitting in that perfectly normal-size chair, reminding me that I’m only just smaller than he is and likely look equally as stupid.
“The pictures she took last night were pretty cool. It was insane to see you revert on camera—at least a little bit of it. And Cynthia seemed thrilled too. Totally over the moon for you.”
My own expression screws up as I try to make sense of his English, if that’s what he’s even speaking. Wondering if things might be clearer if I speak to him in Tratharine, I do. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
His eyes widen. He makes a face. “Tratharine?”
“You speak it too.”
“I do,” he answers in Tratharine before switching back to English. “But I prefer English.”
Strangely, I do too. The Tratharine I knew once feels like it belongs in that rusty crypt I dug it out of, a crypt that I’d like to keep locked.
In English, I continue, “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.
What the fuck are you talking about Cynthia for?
” Cynthia is turning out to be the bane of my existence.
Insulting my girl, calling her out of bed, making her walk across town barefoot, and now interjecting herself into my conversation with the Wyvern, distracting the both of us.
I will add her to the list of people to kill too.
Fuck, kill, kill, destroy, kill—but hers must definitely look like an accident.
I can’t have Monika irritated with me, as it’ll set back my progress in the fuck department.
My horns crackle. He glances up at them, and twin puffs of fire billow from the tips of his. “You . . . don’t like Cynthia?” He cocks his head like I’m no longer speaking English or Tratharine, but Mandarin.
“Of course I don’t like Cynthia! Last night I tortured Cynthia! Why would you think I like that foul, annoying woman?”
I regret asking the moment he pulls out his phone. He opens a social media app and shows me my own latest post. It has six million likes. Six fucking million.
I snatch the device out of his hand and feel anger infuse my irises. In the screen of his phone, I see them reflect purple before bleeding fully red. I feel my left eye twitch and surging electricity sweep my bones as I take in the image on the screen before me.
Me. On one knee at a woman’s feet. Her gazing at me in pure rapture.
A photo Monika took.
The phone screen turns black. A crack appears down the middle. Having ruined the device, I take it all the way and crush it into pieces that fall down around my fist.
The Wyvern doesn’t even blink. He just reaches into his pocket and pulls out a second, identical device. “Don’t worry ’bout it. Happens all the time. At least to me.” He chuckles, like we’re friends. We’re not friends. I’m going to tear him apart.
“Who . . . How . . . What the fuck is this?”
“The picture?”
“Yes.”
“Of you and Cynthia?”
“Of me and that annoying bitch!”
My fingers fly over the keys of my own phone.
My hand shakes as I fight the urge to crush the damn device.
I send an angry email—just the one—before returning my attention to the beast sipping daintily on his coffee across from me.
He’s wearing a white T-shirt, presumably size Xxxxxxxl.
Absurd fucker. Claws or not, I’m going to gouge his eyes out.
“I didn’t revert for Cynthia. I had just finished torturing her by electrocuting her face when I reverted. Monika’s photo seems to have conveniently left that part out.”
The Wyvern sets his coffee cup down. Some sweet-smelling concoction covered in cinnamon. “Interesting.”
“Tell me about your reversion,” I snap.
“I’m sure you’ve read about it in the papers. I got grilled like a flank steak by the COE, SDD, and every damn news outlet in Sundale.”
I nod. “You woke up one morning and looked like . . . that. You found yourself in love with Ms. Theriot and all that mushy shit.”
He laughs. “Yeah, something like that.” And then shakes his head and leans in a little closer. “It was a lie.”
That perks my attention away from the horrifying photo on my phone—the one I don’t know how to take down because I don’t know my own goddamn social media log-in credentials.
“Not a complete lie. All that shit did happen overnight. And then the next morning, when I met with Emily—”
“The doctor?”
“Yeah.”
“What did she have to do with it?”
“Nothing. And at the end of the day, Vanessa didn’t really have anything to do with it either.”
“Explain.”
“Look.” He leans forward and plants his elbows on table.
His fingers drum over the colored tiles, forming the face of an Ethiopian woman looking out over a sunrise.
“I got my memories back from Tratharine. I remember what our lives were like before. We were soldiers. Bred for combat and trained young. Every single part of our lives was violence. They didn’t even give us names, only numbers meant to keep us in line and keep us fighting to be stronger.
The lower numbers were the strongest . . .”
“I’m Six.”
He laughs. “‘Course you would focus on that, you narcissistic fuck. The Elders sent us with a mission to conquer and, once the battlefield had been leveled, open the gates so they could arrive and set up a new world order, enslaving the remaining humans and starting a new breeding ground for soldiers that would then go on and take over another planet, enslave a different people, and on and on and on, and for no fucking purpose other than the accumulation of power—but they made a mistake.”
Curious, I find myself leaning in toward him too. I imagine that we look like high school kids sharing gossip—if high school kids were seven feet tall, sometimes pink, sometimes eggshell blue. “What?”
“The Elders bred us for violence and thought we would revert with a violent trigger, that a spike in pain or rage would bring our original forms and our memories back. They expected that we’d land on an alien planet just as violent as ours—or worse.
” The Wyvern is grinning wildly now. He even has the audacity to laugh.
“But the humans? They welcomed us. There was no pain. No violence. So our original forms had to find new triggers—at least, that’s mine and Emily’s best guess. ”